


Canaries in a Coal Mine

by Gehayi



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Black Character(s), Black Hermione Granger, Black Lavender Brown, Bullying, Curses, F/M, Jealousy, Physical Abuse, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-09 01:09:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10400373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/pseuds/Gehayi
Summary: Hermione lashes out at Ron with attack canaries. Lavender has a few words to say about that.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The first two paragraphs (which are italicized) and the last line (ditto) are from Chapter 14--Felix Felicis of _Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince_ by J.K. Rowling, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, 2005, p. 283.

_Harry spun around to see Hermione pointing her wand at Ron, her expression wild: the little flock of birds was speeding like a hail of fat golden bullets towards Ron, who yelped and covered his face with his hands, but the birds attacked, pecking and clawing at every bit of flesh they could reach._

_"Gerremoffme!" he yelled, but with one last look of vindictive fury, Hermione wrenched open the door—_

—and stopped, as Lavender, who had evidently realized that Ron wasn't following as quickly as he should have, started to enter the room. Flicking a glance at the canaries and Hermione's enraged expression, she lifted her wand. " _Expelliarmus! Finite Incantatem!_ "

Instantly, Hermione's wand flew across the room and the canaries disappeared. Lavender, her head held high, walked over to Ron, who was bleeding from dozens of gouges—several near his eyes—and hugged him with her free arm…keeping her wand trained on Hermione. "You stupid, vicious cow," she said, her voice heavy with contempt. "What did you want to do that for?"

Hermione said nothing, but she eyed her wand which was lying beneath a tangle of desks at the back of the room.

Lavender's eyes narrowed. Waving her wand, she said, " _Congruo cum lapide!_ " 

Hermione's wand floated upwards a few inches and then flew at the stone wall so hard that Harry thought it would shatter. Instead, the vine wood fused with the stone, looking like nothing so much as a slightly elevated (and somewhat twisted) vertical line of granite.

"Sit down," said Lavender quietly.

"I don't have to listen to you! And why should I, when you're threatening me at wandpoint?"

"In case you haven't noticed," Lavender snapped, "I haven't cast a single spell that would harm anyone in this room. I _stopped_ an attack. And don't tell me that you wouldn't attack Ron again—and me—if you had your wand right this minute."

Hermione glared at her but said nothing. Harry eyed the door, fervently wishing that he was elsewhere.

"So," Lavender continued. "Answer the question. Why did you do it?"

Hermione regarded Lavender with haughty disdain. "I shouldn't be surprised that you need something as simple as _that_ explained. Perhaps Divination would help?"

" _I'm_ surprised that someone who is supposedly intelligent thinks that abusing a friend justifiable."

Hermione's eyes narrowed. " _Supposedly_ intelligent?" she said in a dangerous voice.

"I may not get Outstandings in everything," retorted Lavender, "but I'd think that even _you_ would realize that deliberately harming a friend isn't very friendly. You _could_ have just said to Ron, 'You're cute and funny and I want to try kissing you' like I did. I guarantee you it gets better results. If some abusive piece of slime stabbed me in the face with a Dark spell, _I_ wouldn't want to spend any time with them at all."

"I am _not_ abusive!"

"Hah! If your name was Herman and Ron's was Rhonda"—Ron made a face at this—"and Rhonda was kissing a boy called, oh, Leander, and Herman conjured up some small flying attack dinosaurs to stab Rhonda in the face, everyone would say that Herman was abusive scum and that Rhonda should stay far away from him for her own safety."

"Attack dinosaurs?" Harry demanded, unable to keep silent one more minute. He studiously avoided meeting Ron and Hermione's eyes, however. "Sorry, how do you know what a dinosaur is? I thought you were a pureblood."

"I am," replied Lavender. "There's no reason a pureblood can't order books from Blackstones', is there? Look, I heard about some good Muggle books on different systems of astrology from Cho and I ordered them and a catalogue came with the order. There were all kinds of science books and I thought they might be funny, so I bought them. That's how I found out about dinosaurs, and birds being related to them."

Ron was staring at Lavender in shock—as much from the fact that she was willingly reading Muggle books on divination and science, Harry thought, as from her "Herman and Rhonda" example. 

"Ron," said Hermione in a high, thin, trembling voice, "say something. Please. I didn't hurt you that badly…"

"You shouldn't have hurt him at all." Lavender, still gripping her wand, put her fists on her hips. "You shouldn't be hurting anyone. You act like just because you have magic, you can do whatever you like. Well, you can't."

"And why can't I?" Hermione shouted, springing to her feet. "You do, with your kissing and your 'Won-Won'! Just because I got a little jealous—"

"Kissing and silly pet names aren't magic!" Lavender yelled back. "And you can't lash out whenever you get angry or jealous or hurt! You _especially_ can't hex someone because they outrage you and you need to punish them!"

"I certainly can—"

" _That's what Death Eaters do, you fool!_ "

All his life, Harry had heard about "silence resounding in a room." For the first time in his life, he thought he knew what the expression meant. Hermione had fallen silent so quickly that the room almost echoed.

"I'm not saying that you're a Death Eater," Lavender added awkwardly a moment or two later. "But it's easy to start thinking that you're entitled to decide who or what people want—and that you should punish them if they aren't what you want them to be."

 _Like when she captured Rita Skeeter and blackmailed her for being an unregistered beetle Animagus,_ Harry thought. _Or like the house-elves._ He still recalled their fury at Hermione's attempts to give them clothes—and therefore free them—seemingly by accident. Not too surprising, since a wizard in medieval times had enchanted all house-elves, then and in the future, to crave slavery. And for some reason—perhaps one built into the curse on the house-elves—Hermione hadn't even considered breaking the spell first. She'd thought that freeing the house-elves would break the curse, and hadn't paid much attention to them telling her that freedom—which to them meant becoming purposeless, homeless outcasts without friends or family—was exactly what they _didn't_ want.

He felt sick. This was Hermione, one of his best friends; he shouldn't be thinking about her as if she was bad. And yet…when he looked at Ron's bleeding face and the gouges near his eyes, he couldn't help remembering Malfoy hexing Hermione's teeth, and beatings he himself had received from Dudley when they were younger.

Lavender turned to Ron. "Do you want me to come to the infirmary with you?" she asked gently.

Ron, his shocked gaze never leaving Hermione's face, shook his head. 

"All right. I'll see you later, then. " And without so much as a glance at Harry or Hermione, Lavender strode toward the door.

"Wait!" Hermione shouted. "What about my wand?"

Pivoting on one foot, Lavender turned back to stare at Hermione, a girl in Bantu knots gazing at a girl with an Afro. They looked, Harry thought, like two statues, one carved from onyx and the other from mahogany.

"You're a _witch_ ," Lavender said at last. "I'm sure you'll think of _something_. After all, you're the brightest witch of our age, aren't you?"

And with that, she marched out the door. Ron, carefully not looking at anyone, scuttled after her.

There was a long, long pause during which the only audible sounds were two sets of footsteps echoing down the hallway and Hermione breathing loudly and carefully…the sort of breathing done when trying valiantly to stave off tears.

Harry walked over to the wand-wall, fished his own wand out of his robe pocket, and tried to recall the right motions for _Finite Incantatem_. He had seen Lavender perform them only moments ago…but he could not remember them.

"Don't, Harry," Hermione said, gulping. She stood up, wobbling a trifle. "I'll-I'll go ask McGonagall. I'm sure she'll help…" 

And with that, her voice seemed to fail her. She half-trudged, half-stumbled out of the room. _Harry thought he heard a sob before the door slammed._

**Author's Note:**

> "Congruo cum lapide" is Latin for "I blend (it) with stone." Nothing to do with sex, sorry.
> 
> ***
> 
> This scene came up in a discussion recently and I thought that I might as well write a fix-it fic about it. **The existence of the story in no way implies that I think that Hermione is the only person doing abusive things in the Wizarding World.** I was horrified and disgusted by Harry casting Crucio, for example. I detested the Weasley twins selling love potions (read: magical roofies). 
> 
> So yes, Hermione is not alone in this. However, "everybody else is doing it!" has always struck me as a lousy excuse...especially as charms, potions, hexes imbued in artifacts, and so on all take concentration and, in some cases, considerable planning. Moreover, I was traumatized at an early age by Hitchcock's _The Birds_ , which involves flocks of birds pecking people to death, gouging out their eyes, and so on. So for me, canaries attacking Ron is the stuff of literal horror movies, not slapstick.


End file.
